


The Lovers

by Canaan



Series: Major Arcana [3]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: AU, Action/Adventure, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-22
Updated: 2010-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-13 23:15:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canaan/pseuds/Canaan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose wants to see something <i>really</i> different.  Jack wants the Doctor to quit shying away from him.  Nobody wants what they actually get, or it wouldn't be <i>Doctor Who</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The promised sequel to "The Hanged Man." BR'd by the amazing and overworked aibhinn.
> 
> Warning: I promise to make things better by the end, but they're going to get pretty ugly before then.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own the Doctor, Rose, Jack, Doctor Who, or the BBC. The rest is mine, but you can't write science fiction without inventing a few things.

"No, not London."

The Doctor looked over at Rose with wide eyes. "But I thought you'd want to see your mum. Still haven't been back since the tow truck."

 _Haven't been back since I took up with two blokes, one of 'em not even human, either._ She thought she managed not to blush. "I called her straight after I knew we were all goin' to be okay. Told her Jack was hurt, but we'd be home for a visit soon."

"It's soon," the Doctor said, blankly.

"Your mother's never met me," Jack pointed out, cheerfully. It sounded dirty, and Rose wasn't sure why.

She threw her hands in the air. "Oi! Both of you. We're still wounded. 'm not going home till we're not. Human, Time Lord--why is it, everywhere we go, blokes are just the same?"

"It's only reasonable for species' evolving in similar environments to make similar . . . adjustments." It was amazing how Jack could turn even a science lecture into innuendo. "Two arms, two legs, one mouth, at least one . . . "

"Humanoid," Rose cut him off. He blinked. The Doctor stared at her. "You don't have to look so surprised," she said, tartly. "Can't hang around you lot and not learn a few things."

The Doctor grinned. Jack looked vaguely abashed. Well, she'd shut them up long enough to make them listen to her--she might as well take advantage of it. "So what about something really different?" she suggested. "Let's go somewhere where people have two heads or fly or somethin'. There must be places like that."

"Plenty," the Doctor said, wearing that manic grin that meant he was thinking frantically. "So . . . subtract all the worlds where the people are humanoid. Now take away all the places we couldn't breathe. Got to pick a place with gravity that won't mash us into jam. Let's get rid of anywhere with other hostile environment conditions that'd kill or injure us. Now take away the ones that're just dull." He perked up. "Hah! Got it." He set the coordinates and began running around the TARDIS console. He had Jack hold a button and slide two levers while the Doctor himself grabbed for a mallet. Rose took firm hold of a coral strut and held on for dear life.

When the shaking stopped, she asked, "Right. So, where are we, then?"

"Culabree, the crown jewel of the Pr'tans system. Celebrated as an example of cooperation between disparate species. Races come from all over this sector to hold inter-species negotiations here--it's supposed to be good luck."

Jack smiled--his real smile, which they saw less often than they had before Satelite 5. "Fantastic. I've never been here, but it's supposed to be amazing, Rose. Two intelligent species evolved in the system: the Pr'tansi on the third planet out from the sun, and the People of Song on a moon orbiting the fifth planet."

It sounded like a funny name for a species to her, and the Doctor must have caught her expression, because he said, "It's a translation. You couldn't properly say the species name-- _really_ different vocal morphology. Chlorine-breathers."

Jack nodded, looking excited. "When the Pr'tansi and the People of Song found each other in space, they realized that trade would too many benefits not to try it. Culabree is a space station in two halves, one for the Pr'tansi and other oxygen-breathers and the other for the People of Song and other chlorine-breathers."

"They breathe _chlorine_?" Rose asked, numbly amused. She'd asked for different, hadn't she? "Not even air, is it?"

"Well, _you_ breathe _oxygen_ ," the Doctor said, like he was pointing out something brilliant. "Terrible stuff, oxygen: corrosive, volatile, causes aging. Really nasty--unless you happen to be an oxygen-breather. The People of Song need an atmosphere that's about twenty-five percent chlorine gas."

Rose blinked, wondering how this turned into a chemistry lesson. Jack went on. "Culabree's supposed to have these beautiful galleries, side-by-side in the two rings where the oxygen environment and the chlorine environment are next to each other. Art from two species. People go there and stroll the galleries on both sides and see a species in person they could never see up close, otherwise."

"Spirit of cooperation!" the Doctor said, delighted with himself. Rose couldn't help grinning. "Well, come on, then." He held his hands out. Rose took the one nearest her. After a hesitation, Jack took the other.

***

  
The Pr'tansi turned out to be humanoid, though a bit tall. They had fewer fingers than humans or Time Lords, bony projections over each eye that were almost enough to be called horns, and glossy black fur everywhere else. Rose would have expected Jack to eye the fur and make salicious comments, but he didn't seem to notice, let alone flirt. She'd never thought she could miss his flirting with everything that breathed this way--actually, she'd have thought he'd sprain something if he tried to restrain himself. It made her heart ache: Jack was being so very patient, and the Doctor was trying so very hard, that sometimes, it felt like they were walking on eggshells around each other.

The galleries were everything she could have hoped for, though she'd seen a lot of alien art and architecture by now. The TARDIS crew weren't the only foreigners scattered through the Pr'tansi, and the People of Song were, as promised, really, really different. She stared through a wall that looked like simple glass and went all the way around the curve of the station into a yellow-green world filled with what looked like zeppelins made of colored cling wrap turned long-ways down. They had nine limbs each (she wasn't sure if they were legs or arms or tentacles or something else she hadn't thought of), which didn't look sturdy enough to hold them up, but which seemed to do the job. The bumpy protuberances the Doctor said were eyes were arranged around their middles, and Rose swore they were staring at her.

"'Course they are," the Doctor said. "You're an alien."

She blinked and smiled. "Hadn't thought about it that way."

Jack and the Doctor shared a grin at her expense. She ignored it, looking for intelligence in what she never would have guessed were eyes. A being on the other side of the barrier wall advanced toward her. Rose jumped a little as words appeared on the clear glass above its head. "Name this person Seven Green," they read. "Name foreigner?"

Rose grinned and caught her tongue between her teeth. "I'm Rose Tyler. Nice to meet you, Seven Green."

***

  
"But why's the word-order all funny if the TARDIS is translating, anyway?" Rose asked over lunch.

The Doctor grinned. Rose always asked the best questions. "You're seeing a machine translation. The TARDIS is translating that. If you were standing in the same room with Seven Green you'd never know she wasn't speaking English. Except, if you were standing in the same room, one of you'd be dying."

They were eating in a little café the next ring over from the galleries. The gravity here was just enough lower than what humans evolved in for Rose and Jack to feel energized, but not so much Rose might feel ill. Jack, the Doctor assumed, was familiar enough with null-gravity that he wouldn't have to worry.

"Cheerful thought," Jack said. Jack, whose existence rubbed at the Doctor's awareness like sandpaper. It wasn't as bad as it had been at first, but then, the Doctor assumed you'd get used to sandpaper rasping your skin, too. Eventually. "All the same, I'd expect the machine translation to be better--Culabree's so well known for putting such time and effort into inter-species cooperation."

The Doctor grinned, madly. "It will be, eventually. Culabree exists for thousands of years, going through fifteen different physical space stations. We're on the first. Early period, when this is still a magnificent experiment. Where's the fun in seeing it when it's all--"

Their plates bucked and slid on the table as the entire station shook. "--settled?" the Doctor finished. The TARDIS crew was on their feet already while everyone else in the area grabbed after their errant plates. The Doctor noticed the force holding him to the deck wasn't quite right, which meant the station spin wasn't stable. A loud klaxon began sounding, and it spurred everyone else to their feet. Most of the people were visibly frightened, but they were leaving the restaurant in some kind of orderly fashion.

Rose was looking at the Doctor. Jack was looking at the deck, as if he could see through it to the station's rotational thrusters. "Doctor," he asked, "when are we?"


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BR'd by aibhinn; all remaining mistakes are mine.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own the Doctor, Rose, Jack, Doctor Who, or the BBC. The rest is mine, but you can't write science fiction without inventing a few things.

Vahkeet rubbed the base of her eye-ridges. After seven years as the Pr'tansi head of Culabree's Environmental Services department, she was one of two people who held the entire station in her mind. She knew its strengths, its weaknesses, its whims, its small satisfied sounds and the occasional grind and buzz of its complaints. And right now, it was screaming.

Kulver droned damage reports in her general direction. "Thelos-eight is open to space, but sections four through seven have tight-sealed. The hard seal's seriously compromised--thelos venting into manar-one in a dozen different places, and seal twenty-seven didn't lock down, so manar-one continues slow-venting into manar-two."

"Why are we venting into manar-two?" she asked Kulver. "The pressure differential shouldn't be that high, even if twenty-seven didn't quite lock." She had a full auto-diagnostic running on her screens, and the more the data came in, the less she liked it.

The harried tech pressed buttons. "Um, pressure differential's at . . . no. That can't be right."

"Fathers save me from new graduates," Vahkeet murmured in sl'et. The dialect was obscure enough, she could even swear in it without alarming her staff. "How bad?" she asked.

Kulver sent the readings to her screen. She blinked. "What's the thelos air sampling say? L'nar, do me a model of the damage--I want to know if it's straight-line."

Straight-line damage meant impact. She heard a curse behind her, but elected to ignore it, punching up air sampling in the manar side of the station. Thirty-seven years of operation within Culabree's designed parameters, and it had ended on her watch. At least, after an emergency, she could usually comm Mischief Linear and commiserate with her counterpart among the People of Song on the thelos side of the station. Now Mischief Linear was dead, and Vahkeet wasn't sure where the end of this one lay.

She tapped a finger against the read-outs. That was way too much chlorine on manar-two, already. "Drus, send out a general announcement for self-contained breathers for persons on manar-two, and make it breathers on standby throughout the rest of the manar side. And get someone to that failed one-two seal: I want a physical inspection so Repair can pull what they need."

Vahkeet let the controlled chaos flow around her as people acted on her orders. There was a call in from the manar-side governor. She hesitated, then sent a code for a rank two emergency and ignored the call. As the head of environmental services, rank two put her in equal charge of Culabree's manar side until the emergency was over. _Meaning I get an equal share of the blame_ , she thought.

"Straight-line damage," L'nar reported, "we have straight-line damage, Vahkeet. Model on your screen in four, three, two, one . . . "

"I already know what it's going to show," Kulver said, sounding a little grey around the nose.

"It took out a main chlorine tank, didn't it?" Vahkeet asked, looking at model for confirmation of the picture she'd already drawn in her head. She very carefully did not groan as she inspected the model of the station with the impact-damage marked. "Make that _both_ main chlorine tanks."

"Collateral damage!" an unfamiliar voice said, entirely too cheerfully.

"At least our rotation's corrected," another offered. Vahkeet looked over to see a trio of aliens traipsing through her control room like they belonged there. One of the ones with dark hair went on, "Stations without artificial gravity always make me nervous. It's too much like trusting my life to _tinfoil_ and _transistors_."

The alien terms didn't translate, but they definitely didn't sound complimentary. She supposed it--he?--thought he was being quiet. The light-haired one didn't agree, judging by the elbow it (she?) jabbed at the speaker's ribs. The third alien (Fathers, didn't his aural caps just hang out there like handles?) walked right up to her, holding out an official-looking license. That suited her--she'd love to know why security let aliens into Environmental Services in the middle of a rank two emergency. "I'm the Doctor, and these are my assistants, Rose Tyler and Captain Jack Harkness. Came to see if we can help."

The license was alien, but it had all the right stamps and signatures to be meaningful in Pr'tansi space. Which meant, Vahkeet supposed, that she was obliged to be polite. "Thank you, Doctor, but failure analysis is a bit more after-the-fact than our current situation. Our emergency procedures are well in effect." She gave him her most quelling administrative look.

"Well, about that . . . " The alien rubbed the back of his neck. "You're about to have a bit of a problem unless you get the seal between oxygen rings one and two to work. Environmental scrubbing just won't be able to handle all the outgassing."

Vahkeet managed to look at him steadily, but she really wanted to know where he'd obtained that detailed a schematic of the damage. "Of course," she said, calmly. "We have a repair team scrambling now. The procedures for micrometeor impact and environmental breech are well-established." And, mercifully, never used on this scale. Up till now.

"Vahkeet, we have eyes-on for the one-two seal," Drus announced. "To your screen."

Vahkeet looked at the visual. Liquid was raining off the seal--and that was only the portion of the hostile atmosphere that had begun to condense in the cooler temperature of the station's manar-side. There was a huge chunk torn out of the seal's material, and Vahkeet knew there would be a corresponding hole between manars two and three. The on-site tech's comments, scrolling across the bottom of the picture, were both colorful and redundant.

Vahkeet growled a little. It was not a good day in Environmental Services. "Drus, tell Repair we need a patch-seal between three and two. Forget seal twenty-seven: It's a lost cause. Kulver, I want everyone in here to have breathers. Now." She looked over at the aliens. "Doctor failure-analysis, I don't suppose you know anything about modifying environmental scrubbers?"

***

  
Time, Jack thought, was damn subjective. They had a time machine, yet here he was, struggling against the passage of minutes with the Doctor and Rose and every other oxygen-breather on Culabree. If they didn't get these scrubbers modified to deal with some of the gasses they were never designed for, the entire life support system on the oxygen--manar--side of the station would overload.

Not that they really _had_ the TARDIS anyway, at the moment. Their poor girl was sitting in the first manar ring, separated from them by a stew of gaseous chlorine going steadily liquid and other components toxic to most oxygen-breathers. As soon as Environmental Services could vent the thelos side of the station to space, the danger would be past and he could stop visualizing Rose and the Doctor dead while he was impossibly alive again. The idea of standing in a station full of ghosts and the ruins of the grand interspecies experiment made his skin crawl.

The Doctor moved agitatedly around the room, giving orders to a group of flustered-looking Pr'tansi techs, with occasional shouts to Jack and Rose. "Hold this for me while I run a bead around the edges, Rose?" Jack asked. Rose put her hands where requested and smiled behind the clear material of her breather mask. The mask covered her mouth, nose, and eyes, protecting them from the growing concentration of dangerous fumes. Tubing ran from the mask down to a tank that strapped around her waist.

Jack glanced at the Doctor, slant-wise, as he started the chemical weld. "You know," he said, "for a Time Lord and a genius, he's not much of a pilot."

Rose shrugged. "Not sure it's his driving," she said. "The TARDIS has notions, sometimes." Jack blinked at her casual statement and almost dropped the welder. Rose made an unpleasant face. "My nose itches and I can't scratch it. I hate this thing. And what if I want to kiss you?"

Jack grinned at her through his own mask. "Hold that thought, sweetheart," he said. "Even if you held your breath and kept your eyes closed, there'd still be some irritation from the air right now."

Rose nodded. "So these are goin' to take the chlorine out of the air. What then?"

"These," Jack said, tapping the scrubber they were working on with one finger, "will buy us about twelve hours, according to the Doctor. It shouldn't take Vahkeet's team more than three or four to finish patching the hole between rings two and three and shore up the areas that were never intended for vacuum exposure from that direction."

"Then they'll vent the thelos atmosphere into space," the Doctor said, making Jack jump as the Time Lord suddenly spoke from behind him, "which'll reduce the levels of toxic gasses to something the scrubbers can handle on an indefinite basis."

Rose stared at him. "They're goin' to _vent_ the air?" she said, horrified. Jack realized, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that she hadn't really understood the situation. "But that'll kill everyone on the chlorine side!"

The Doctor looked saddened and couldn't quite meet her eyes. Jack bit the inside of his lip. _He_ didn't want to be the one to tell her. "I'm sorry, Rose," the Doctor said. "When the chlorine tanks blew, it killed them. They died in the first few minutes."

The Doctor's eyes met Jack's with a deep guilt that made Jack's chest ache. Jack forgot about the Doctor's cringing from him for a moment and just wanted to wrap the other man in his arms. They couldn't protect Rose from this, no matter how much they wanted to, and it hurt. "Then . . . " Rose started. She stopped and swallowed. "Seven Green was my age. Just finished school, she said." Her hands drifted away from their position on the scrubber.

Jack was mostly done with the weld; the pieces held in place without her. The Doctor gathered Rose close and held her, mindful of her breather hose. Jack swallowed against a burgeoning tightness in his throat. His hands were full of equipment, yeah, so he shouldn't envy the Doctor's comforting Rose, and he didn't want to be jealous that the Doctor touched their lover so easily. But he did, and he was. Rose's existence didn't rub the Doctor's nerves raw.

Jack sighed into his breather and finished the weld.

***

The Doctor looked over Vahkeet's shoulder, studying her screens as intently as she did. Rose was perched on Jack's lap as they shared the subsidiary station Vahkeet had directed them to, but the Doctor was too restless to stay still, and besides, Vahkeet's display ran far more inputs at once. The Doctor could see the pressure on the thelos side of the station, the contaminants in each of the manar rings, the air quality maintained by the modified scrubbers, and the overall schematic of repairs and reinforcements in manar-one and manar-two.

"We're go from here," one of the Pr'tansi techs said.

Vahkeet murmured figures under her breath. "Going to be a long time picking ice out of the local vicinity," the Doctor commented.

"If we can save half the lives on this station, they'll forgive me," Vahkeet said. "Scoop ships, we can get." She raised her voice. "Confirmed go. Thelos seal control to my board, please." The display flashed up. "L'nar, keep your hand on the rotational correctors--I don't like the look of our automatics. Venting thelos rings in four, three, two, one . . . " She touched a segment of the display.

Nothing happened. Vahkeet touched the trigger point again and muttered something under her breath about modern technology. The Doctor set his sonic screwdriver and fiddled her screens with it, looking at all of Culabree's thelos-side seals. "There's your problem," he said. "All of your external seals just deadlocked."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to aibhinn for the BR! She mostly keeps me from making an idiot of myself. ;)
> 
> Warning: I promise to make things better by the end, but they're going to get pretty ugly before then.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own the Doctor, Rose, Jack, Doctor Who, or the BBC. The rest is mine, but you can't write science fiction without inventing a few things.

"What's the difference between a rank two emergency and a rank one emergency?" Rose asked.

"I outrank Culabree's governor in a rank one environmental emergency," Vahkeet said. "Which, Fathers know, is not a chair I ever wanted to sit in. Apparently the Fathers aren't listening today."

The Doctor was deep in jiggery-pokery mode, fiddling with Vahkeet's screens as the two of them tried to figure out why the seals had deadlocked--and, more to the point, how to fix it. "And catch all the blame?" Rose said.

Vahkeet made a rude noise. "The two do go together, certainly. The protocol to deadlock the external seals is actually a design feature. It allows us to keep pirates out and prevent ships from leaving dock in certain emergencies where that would only make things worse. What I don't understand is why it's gone off now."

Rose looked vaguely at the screen she and Jack were sharing. It had damage diagrams and oodles of data that didn't mean much to her on it. Jack was fiddling with the data. "This doesn't make any sense," he muttered.

That went for all of it, as far as Rose was concerned. "What doesn't?"

He squeezed her around the waist, absently, and poked the screen with the fingertips of his free hand. "I thought maybe I could get the system to talk to my wrist computer. Try to run a few diagnostics off an outside paradigm. But I can't even get that far." He was frowning. "The data's inconsistent, or maybe, the way the system's handling the data is inconsistent. It's like . . . " He looked up from the screen and turned his head to her. "It's like if you told the station's computer system to add two and two, and the first nine times it did, it told you the answer was four. And the tenth time, it told you the answer was five."

"Like there's a bug," Rose said.

Jack looked at her. "Now there's something that doesn't happen often," he said. "I heard you say 'bug' in English, but I got a translation, too." She looked startled. "So . . . what does 'bug' mean in English that isn't an insect? My slang's a little spotty."

She smiled, in spite of the situation. The Doctor and Vahkeet had begun having an animated discussion about the characteristics of deadlocks somewhere off to her left. She tuned them out. "And they wouldn't have had bugs in 1941--no computers, yet. I had a science teacher who told us why we call it that--think he was trying to teach us about the importance of keeping tables and test tubes clean, which didn't much impress a bunch of twelve-year-olds. See, computers used to be so big they took up whole rooms, and they were so new, nobody was really trained to use 'em. People who were good at figuring things out kind of made it up as they went along.

"So one day, a computer wasn't behaving quite right, and nobody could figure out why. And this librarian said she'd take a look. She walked right into this room-sized computer, and when she walked out again, she had a dead moth in her hand. The poor thing had flown into the machine and died, and havin' it there caused all kinds of problems. She told the other people she'd found a bug. So weird computer problems, we still call it a bug."

Jack shook his head. "That'd make this a bug, all right." He keyed a couple things into his wrist strap and shook his head.

Rose frowned at the Pr'tansi screen where the diagram of damaged Culabree was displayed. "Jack . . . what if it _is_ a bug? Sort of. Something actually hit the station, yeah? Flew right on in, made all those holes on the way. Could you . . . make this thing show where all the bits and bobs of the computer system are, and kind of lay it over the picture of the station?"

Jack's stomach flipped over in a way that had nothing to do with the fractional gravity. "Rose, either you're brilliant or you're dead wrong. And, no offense, I hope you're wrong." He started fiddling with the screen again.

"Me, too," Rose said. After a minute, a series of blue lines and boxes ran through the station diagram. Rose drew a line through all the damaged bits with her fingertip, stopping when it touched a small blue box. "What's this?" she asked.

"Tertiary node." Rose almost jumped out of her skin as the Doctor spoke--she'd thought he was into it too deep with Vahkeet to be paying any attention. She turned her head to find her and Jack's diagram on Vahkeet's system, instead.

"Not significant on its own," Vahkeet mused. "We have fail-overs. But certainly not designed to absorb physical interruption. If our luck holds as bad as it's been, the micrometeor could have touched something critical and we might have had flashback from the node into the main system."

"Yes," the Doctor agreed, plying his sonic screwdriver and causing the diagram to rotate and grow. "And if the damage is physical, and throughout the system, we're not goin' to get it all fixed inside of eight hours." He shook his head, staring at the screen. "Got to be a simpler way to release the deadlock," he complained.

Vahkeet rubbed one eyeridge, distractedly. "Actually," she said, "there might be."

***

  
The Doctor grinned to himself as he handed himself along a narrow access tube behind the Pr'tansi tech Kulver. It had been a while since he'd had to maneuver without gravity, and he'd forgotten how much fun it could be. Rose hadn't been inclined to try the passage down the core maintenance shaft--just sitting in the fractional gravity of Environmental Services unsettled her stomach a little, she said.

Vahkeet had wondered what Rose's specialty was--she obviously didn't know computers and she wasn't an engineer. The Doctor knew that Rose sometimes felt outclassed in this partnership when the subject of education came up: Vahkeet's question had made her look awkwardly down at her knees. Jack looked protective and the Doctor said, "Seeing the obvious. Much more difficult than it sounds, that, and almost impossible to train." He'd made Rose smile and Jack grin, and he'd felt a whole lot better about leaving them to go and see these manual overrides in person.

"Watch your momentum," Kulver warned him, which was rather like warning your grandfather to look both ways crossing the street. They began to brake themselves on the handholds as they approached a hatch labeled "Environmental 11." The Doctor was sure Jack would have some inappropriate comment about finally being all the way in, but Jack, too, had elected to stay in Environmental Services' control room. To keep trying to stabilize some part of the system with his wrist computer, he said, or see if he couldn't bring just the external seals under separate control.

Or, the Doctor thought, Jack was trying to stay out of close proximity. For whose sake, the Doctor's or his own, the Doctor wasn't sure. It was almost to the point where it hurt more to watch Jack's mindful distance and subdued manner than it did to push through the lingering, sandpaper-fact of his existence.

Kulver opened the hatch and shoved himself inside. A strong ozone odor wafted out as the Doctor followed. Kulver said something that didn't translate, but cursing was fairly identifiable in any language. The usually crisp edges of polymer pieces were warped with heat and a number of panels bore faint char marks. "Flash-back," the Doctor commented. "Right. Where are the manual controls for those seals?"

The tech pointed to a particular panel that looked no better or worse off than any of the others. The Doctor drew his sonic screwdriver and began inspecting it while Kulver tapped a button on his collar and spoke to thin air. "Vahkeet, we're here, but we may have a problem." Kulver went silent a moment. Then he said, "Physical damage. Looks heat-related. We'll just have to try it and see."

The Doctor let Kulver manipulate buttons and switches as Vahkeet directed the tech on the never-used procedure via an earpiece, but his screwdriver reported a nasty mess of singed connections and parts out of tolerance behind the panel. Oh, it was nothing that couldn't be sorted in a day or two--less if you were a genius--but they didn't have a day or two. "Anything?" Kulver asked after a while.

The Doctor couldn't hear Vahkeet's answer, but the tech looked notably ill. "Give that over," the Doctor said, tapping his own ear. Kulver removed his earpiece and offered it. The Doctor managed to tuck it into his own, very differently-shaped, ear, and spoke loudly enough that the tech's microphone ought to pick up his voice. "We getting anything, then?" he asked.

"Not a twitch," Vahkeet's voice answered him. "I'll send a repair crew down, but we'd better start looking for another plan."

The Doctor chuckled. "Good at plans, me. Some of 'em even work. We'll come back up."

***

  
Vahkeet was going to rub the base of her eye-ridges bald at this rate. Which was a shame, as they were very nicely-shaped eye ridges, and if Jack hadn't gone and gotten himself attached, he could think of much better things to do to them. "Not very reassuring, your Doctor," she told him and Rose.

"You have no idea," Jack agreed. "Good at what he does, though. I trust him more without any plan than I trust most people with one."

Rose was frowning off into space. "So if the atmosphere over here were leaking into the other side, and the People of Song needed those controls, what would they do? Have done," she corrected herself, unhappily. Jack hugged her, gently, but it didn't take the frown off her face.

Vahkeet shook her head. "They have their own manual controls," she said. "Redundant controls for everything, between both sides of the station. Culabree is . . . " She stumbled. "Culabree was a partnership."

"So there's a redundant set of override controls for those seals, if only we could survive the environment over there," Jack said.

Vahkeet looked tired. "Of course. But you'd never make it in a breather: It's not a completely self-sufficient system. Not to mention--"

"Environmental suits?" Jack interrupted her.

The Pr'tansi shook her head. "In flooded lockers in manar-one. Besides, they're bulky--you'd never fit one through the core access tunnel. They're just not designed for it."

"Would a space suit be small enough?" Jack asked.

Vahkeet considered. "Probably, if the air pack was on a separate leader. Culabree doesn't have any--the enviro-suits do double duty for the small amount of exterior maintenance we need to do. But there are always a dozen or more ships docked." She tapped a finger against her screen, absently. "Drus," she said, "have Communications contact all ships in port. Find out who has maintenance suits that are Pr'tansi or compatible."

"Wait a minute," Jack said. "That deadlock--is it just the seals on the thelos side, or is it all airlocks all over Culabree?"

Every head in the room turned to look at him. Vahkeet muttered under her breath: "Bastard son of a Fatherless nemot . . . "

No one seemed to notice. One of the techs worked a screen. "He's right, Vahkeet," the tech said. "We won't be getting into or out of those ships right now."

That left them in silence for several minutes. Eventually, the door to the control room slid open. "So," the Doctor said, cheerfully, "what did I miss?"

***

  
Jack found himself pacing in the back of Environmental Services. The Doctor might be the Time Lord, but Jack felt the minutes slipping heavily through his fingers. The Doctor had gone back to working against that rogue deadlock command. Oh, there'd been a trip out to the docks to see if there was a way to force an airlock, and the manar side's Repair section kept sending Vahkeet's team status updates on the manual controls, but their most optimistic estimate put the repair at four hours past life support failure.

So it was back to fighting with Culabree's malfunctioning central nervous system, which left Jack and Rose effectively useless. Rose was handling it better than Jack--and whatever nagging fear of death she might have, too. She watched him with faintly unhappy eyes. "You're makin' me dizzy," she said, and rubbed at the edge of her breather mask.

He walked over and caught her wrist, rubbing the inside with the pad of his thumb since he couldn't kiss it. "Don't break that seal," he reminded her.

She smiled a little. "Do you think any of the People of Song might've survived?" she asked. "They must've had something like these, yeah?"

Jack shook his head, but it was the young Pr'tansi tech, Kulver, who really answered. "Breathers are an emergency measure," he said. "You get oxygen, yeah, but they only handle waste gasses correctly under certain conditions. That's why they're not enough if we really lose the life support. The People of Song's breathers wouldn't work for long with the kind of atmospheric pressure over there. The mask seal wouldn't be good enough." He shuddered. "Anybody who got a breather on was unlucky. It took them longer to die."

Rose shuddered, too. Jack swallowed and squeezed her hand. "I just keep thinking about Seven Green. It's not like I knew her very well, but she was so young. Doesn't seem fair, but I suppose dying never is."

"We'll come up with _something_ ," the Doctor muttered without looking up from his fiddling.

"Death never is," Vahkeet agreed. They'd been at this for hours, and she sounded weary. "Every so often, I find myself thinking I can call Mischief Linear and have him send one of his team to their overrides. And then I remember that if I could, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. That I'll still be wanting to comm him and share how clever my team was and laugh with him and share my relief . . . and I can't. Ever again."

Jack shivered and swallowed hard, struck again by the thought of the Doctor and Rose--and everyone else--dead. It was clear enough what had to happen: They had to lay hands on those controls. He let Rose's fingers slip from his own and tucked his hands in his pockets. He took a deep breath against a kind of fear he was out of practice at feeling. "Doctor," he said, "how long would a breather give me in that atmosphere?"


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BR courtesy of aibhinn the awesomely diligent. Not too ugly yet in this chapter, but it's getting there fast.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own the Doctor, Rose, Jack, Doctor Who, or the BBC. The rest is mine, but you can't write science fiction without inventing a few things.

"Doctor," Jack said, "how long would a breather give me in that atmosphere?"

The Doctor met Jack's eyes, slowly. Jack's gaze was steady, deep, and tried to hide fear without success. The Doctor held his sonic screwdriver in numb fingers and wanted to growl his frustration. He'd tried so hard to find some other way, any other way. He hadn't mentioned it to Jack--hadn't even looked at him for fear of cueing him somehow. And now, Jack was asking the question anyway, and the Doctor didn't want to answer. He shoved his sonic screwdriver back into his pocket. "Minutes," he said, gruffly.

Jack nodded. Rose said, "Is that enough time to get to the controls?"

The station's construction was roughly symmetrical in both directions from the hard seal. Environmental 11 was ten minutes away in a friendly environment. Under those conditions . . . But Jack pasted on a grin under the bulk of his breather's mask, turning on every bit of charm he owned before he answered Rose. "I can make it work out," he said. "I can get to the overrides on that side and Vahkeet can talk me through the buttons and levers. Can't be any worse than the Doctor's directions on the central console, right?" His voice was unreasonably cheerful, brushing completely past the trip he knew would lie ahead of him and Rose's future anger when she understood how he'd played her. "Once the seals are back under control, the Doctor can borrow a spacesuit, get to the TARDIS, and come pull me out. Simple."

The Doctor crossed the floor to them with rapid steps, dropping his voice so Vahkeet's entire control floor wouldn't hear the argument. "It's not just the atmosphere, Jack!" The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. Jack had heard of Culabree, but he didn't know . . .

Only he did. The false grin faded, and the Doctor realized he'd just blown Jack's only chance to leave without Rose understanding what he was really up against. "Then what is it?" she asked, her voice thin with fear.

Jack shrugged, keeping his voice low. "Temperature, and some different kinds of radiation. The People of Song need some things to survive that'll kill a human. But . . . Captain Jack Harkness, alive and whole--forever, you said, right, Doctor? Condition of the universe?"

The Doctor swallowed. Jack was right. They both knew it, and there wasn't any other way. Rose stared at Jack. "It's going to kill you," she whispered.

Jack shrugged again and wouldn't meet her eyes. "The gas or the radiation. Probably both. Definitely before you can get me out again."

"No!" she protested. She was on her feet now, and the Pr'tansi techs were trying to pretend they hadn't noticed her sudden protest.

Jack wrapped her in his arms. "Not exactly looking forward to it, Rose," he murmured, near her ear. "If there was another way, I wouldn't do it. But if we can't blow the external seals on the thelos side of the station, this stuff'll kill everyone soon enough. Including both of you. I won't sit still for that."

Rose clung to him, her body shaking with the effort not to sob. The Doctor looked at Jack over her shoulder, meeting the other man's eyes. The last time we did this, he thought, you could at least kiss us goodbye. Now, the silly breathers prevented even that. Last time, Jack hadn't had time to think about it, and the fear in his eyes hadn't been so stark. "I'm counting on you to keep talking to me, Doctor, Rose. Oxygen deprivation makes humans a little funny, but as long as you talk me through it, I can do this."

"I don't know how I can bear it," Rose breathed, tightly.

The Doctor stared at one lover over the other's head. Life held in the arms of all that stillness, and the stillness was just Jack. It was no less a part of him than, and no different to, his conviction that he'd keep doing what the Doctor asked, even as he was dying. The Doctor closed the gap between them and held them both. "We'll manage, Rose. We have to." He leaned his forehead against the top of her head above their masks for a moment.

He straightened up and released his partners. "Jack," he said, "take a breath and close your eyes."

Jack stared at him blankly for a moment before he let go of Rose. He breathed in deeply and closed his eyes. The Doctor slid Jack's mask down as he wrapped an arm around his lover's waist. He closed his own eyes and let his respiratory bypass kick in before removing his mask. He didn't have to see Jack to meet his lips, didn't have to breathe to say "I love you" with his mouth and tongue. Jack's mouth opened under his touch, and they drew apart only when Jack was running out of air.

The two men replaced their masks to find Rose staring at them, her eyes bright and anguished. Jack blinked eyes reddened by the fumes in the air and reached out to lay a finger on her breather mask, just above a tear running down her cheek. "Don't cry, Rose. First rule of any closed respiration system: Don't hurl and don't cry."

She tried to smother a giggle that was half-sob. "You come back to us, Jack Harkness," she said.

***

  
From the moment the Doctor walked into her control room and opened his mouth, Vahkeet had wondered if he wasn't quite mad. Now she found herself thinking all three aliens were. The Doctor insisted the Captain would be fine, while Rose looked . . . well, if she were Pr'tansi, Vahkeet thought she'd be grey around the nose.

They might be the Doctor's assistants, but it had always been obvious that Rose was more than that, and Vahkeet suspected snogging the breath out of one's assistant before sending him off do something unpleasant wasn't a cultural norm for these aliens. The Doctor sat at the spare station with Rose and looked like it was killing him to let Jack cycle through the air lock in the core's central access shaft.

Jack's gasp came through the speakers in Environmental Services. Just listening to it hurt. "I see what you mean . . . about the pressure and the mask seal," he grated, his voice already rough with damage.

"Don't talk unless you have to," the Doctor directed. "More effort; harder on your vocal cords."

Jack's laugh was strained. "How else are you gonna know I'm alive? I'm at a three-way junction--which tube do I want?"

"Tube two," the Doctor said. "You'll see a line of handholds on the core-ward side of the tube. Don't let yourself build up too much momentum."

"Ah, come on, Doc, I've done a little null-gravity maneuvering before." Oh, Fathers, that sounded . . . wrong, somehow.

Vahkeet wasn't the only one who felt that way: Rose snickered--very much against her will, it sounded like--and the Doctor said, "Oi! Want all these people to get the wrong idea?"

"Rather they got the right one," Jack grunted, though what that might be, Vahkeet didn't want to guess. Nor did it matter--she recognized Jack's banter as the kind of thing brave men did to cover their fear, while everyone pretended they didn't notice. "Never been sick in null-gravity before, though," he commented. "Could live without."

That wiped any trace of a smile from the other aliens' faces. Vahkeet gave the Doctor a sharp look. "I thought the Doctor said the environment over there wouldn't hurt you?" Which had amazed her--she'd taken all three for the same species.

She could hear the Captain struggling for breath. He gave her a non-committal grunt. The Doctor's mouth thinned to a tense line. "I said he'd be fine. He will, after. Never said it wouldn't hurt."

Rose's fingers tightened on the edge of the station she sat, the knuckles going white with it. Vahkeet stared at the Doctor. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Could you have done something different?" he asked.

Could she? She could have insisted they keep trying to beat the deadlock through the computer system . . . right up until there was no more time in which to make the choice. She found herself looking at the floor. After a minute or two, Jack said, "Talk to me, Doc, Rose."

The Doctor said, "Where are you, Jack?"

There was a long pause. "Hard to see. Last hatch said 'Repair 7'."

The Doctor frowned. "Slow down." Having done the same trip on the manar side of the station, he'd know how fast Jack was drifting down the access tube.

Rose didn't like that. She shook her head, violently, but the Doctor ignored her. It was a balancing act: The slower you went, the longer you were in a hostile environment, but if you built up too much momentum in the spin-less core of the station, you could hurt yourself when you tried to stop. "Do you . . . one better . . . Doc." Jack's reply was a mumble. "Gonna . . . take a little break."

Was this expected? Rose looked like she'd been slapped, but her voice was steady when she said, "Whatever you need, Jack."

The ragged sound of his breathing got quieter, and Vahkeet gave the Doctor an alarmed look. The Doctor just swallowed visibly and said, "A few minutes, Jack. We'll be here."

They were long, anxious minutes. Rose's slender, hairless hands wrung at each other now, and the Doctor's face was utterly blank as he wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her closer. Then Jack drew an achingly gasped breath, struggling for oxygen. "Jack!" Rose gasped, and got a pained noise in reply.

"Jack," the Doctor said, more quietly. "Do you see the handholds?" When only silence answered, he repeated, "Jack. Find the handholds in the tube."

After a moment, the Captain grumbled, "Got one. Direction?"

The Doctor said, "Find the arrows on the side by the handholds. Move the opposite direction."

For a moment, there was only the sound of labored breathing. Vahkeet glanced at her team, taking in anxious noises and small finger-signs that were a sign of desperation more than faith. Then Jack said, "Moving."

The Doctor said, "Not too fast, or you won't be able to brake."

There was a pause. "Right," Jack's voice agreed.

The Doctor said, "Tell me what you see, Jack."

"Environmental 8."

He was only two-thirds of the way there. Vahkeet looked at her team around her, feeling all their lives fragile in a way she never had before, and murmured a little prayer in sl'et. Rose covered her mask with her hands like she could hide behind them.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BR love goes to aibhinn.
> 
> Warnings: Dark! Dark! And freakin' dark! Possibly also gruesome and sappy. Hanky warning.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own the Doctor, Rose, Jack, Doctor Who, or the BBC. The rest is mine, but you can't write science fiction without inventing a few things.

Jack gasped and sweated and burned inside and out. His left arm was hooked through something, and it was too much effort to pull free. There were gabbling noises in his ear, but it wasn't worth scrabbling at it when he was much more interested in breathing. He felt like retching, but he really shouldn't--he couldn't think why, but he was sure of it.

The noises turned into a voice he knew. It said his name and he tried to respond. "Good lad," the voice said. He'd have smiled, if only his chest didn't ache so. There were more meaningless noises, then, but the voice said, "There are three sliders on the panel with the handhold. Slide them all to zero."

He tried to find the sliders. They were soft lozenges on lines faded almost beyond recognition in his vision. "Fuzzy," he muttered as he moved them.

"I know, Jack." The voice was gentle with him. "On the same wall, find the blue button."

There were lots of buttons. "Blue" didn't seem to cover any of them. "All the same," he complained.

There was a pause. "Press the _largest_ button." Jack spied it and pressed. "Jack, did you find it?"

He closed his eyes. His breath burned in his throat, even as he strained for more of it. "Pressed."

"Good, Jack. Good. Just one more thing. Find the lever by the buttons."

"Lever." Jack opened his eyes again and looked. The lever was dark and almost as wide as his hand. "Pull?"

"Pull it."

Jack pulled. It made the noises louder. The voice said, "I'll be right there, Jack, just hang on."

Jack groaned, softly. He trusted that voice, but "hang on" seemed like a whole lot of effort. His chest was tight and spots flashed around the edges of his vision. He drew a deep breath, coughed, and finally retched, helplessly. He grabbed at his face with his free hand. It found the edge of a polymer seal and he peeled the slick stuff away, reflexively. His lungs screamed and his eyes burned, but his stomach emptied itself like it was a separate entity.

When his arm got tired, the mask slipped back into place. Pain pulsed behind his eyes, even more than in the rest of his body, and the noise in his ear just made it worse. Then a voice he trusted said, "Jack? Jack? You with me, Jack?" He tried to make a noise.

"Jack, Vahkeet says you're not goin' to be able to hear anything in a minute. Just hang on--it'll be all right. The Doctor'll be right there. You just hold on . . . We love you."

***

  
He floated, gasping for breath and cold all through. There was no sound, no voice in his ear. It made him want to weep, though he wasn't sure why, and he knew he shouldn't, though he couldn't remember why that was so, either. Breathing was a nearly pointless exercise: His lungs strained and screamed as they sought after a sadly deficient trickle of oxygen and his heart beat wildly in his chest, like it was trying to get out. He didn't have the focus to wonder how long it had been going on like that. Spots danced in front of his eyes, and he had the nagging feeling he was dying, but he couldn't seem to get worked up about it--it just took energy his oxygen-deprived blood and brain didn't give him.

Suddenly, he could breathe. For a long time, there was only that: the sensation of crisp, sweet air filling his burning lungs. Eventually, he noticed an all-over ache, an almost debilitating nausea, and a sense of pressure along parts of his body. The pressure shifted and changed, and a gentle, bobbing sensation came into being with it. Jack just breathed.

Sudden heat hit him at the same time a painful pressure cut along his torso and the tops of his legs. "Jack," he heard. The pressure was consistent enough and strong enough that he eventually concluded it was gravity. "Jack, it's okay, I've got you. I've got you."

Everything kept moving, but Jack relaxed. There was something cool and slick under his forehead. The soft sounds of the TARDIS drifted into his awareness. "Doctor," he croaked, and tried to move.

"Hold still, Jack--we're almost to the med bay."

Jack made out some of the pressure as an arm wrapped around the back of his knee. He blinked, or thought he did, in the darkness. "We did it?" he asked.

"Yeah." The Doctor's voice was rough in his ears. Gravity spun unpleasantly for a moment and then stayed put, pressing the left side of his body down against something. It all felt like pain to him and every inch of his skin screamed. "Med bay," the Doctor said.

Jack blinked a few more times with no change, and the Doctor pulled something--a mask, he thought, much more comfortable than the dreadful breather--away his face. The TARDIS's air smelled like home. "I can't see," Jack said, anxiously.

There was a faint hesitation before the Doctor replied. "To be expected. Still got healing to do, you. It'll come." There was a gentle touch of something that wasn't skin on his cheek, but it felt like the Doctor's touch, nonetheless.

Jack closed his eyes and sighed, contentedly. He was breathing. He was home. He could live with--well, survive--a lot for that touch. "Still glowing, huh?" he murmured, the strain in his lungs easing slowly.

"Some," the Doctor admitted. "It's getting better--nothing the TARDIS can't deal with. We're going to slip back in time just a little, going back to Rose. Didn't think it would be good for her, havin' to see you from the inside of a radiation suit, but we don't want to worry her, either."

"Yeah," Jack agreed, turning his head to press his cheek more firmly into the Doctor's hand. His stomach roiled and his body felt enormously heavy. It was hard to think past that. "We won't tell her, right?" he asked, quietly. "Like the Delta wave?"

Memory echoed loudly in the silence between them. A mechanical voice said, _"But he will exterminate you!"_

 _"Never doubted him. Never will."_

The Doctor stroked his Jack's hair back from his face. "No," he agreed. "Not unless you want her to know."

"Hell no," Jack muttered, laughing weakly. He cracked his eyelids and was greeted by a dull glow. "'m seeing something," he reported. "Kind of. Feel worse, though."

The Doctor's other hand settled into the bend of his elbow, petting his exposed skin very gently. Even that brought pain, but the simple, human (human?) contact was fantastic--in fact, he thought it might be all that was holding him together, and he was passing beyond pain to a numb place where it just didn't register. The Doctor said, "You were alive . . . a while before we got into the TARDIS. I don't know how much exposure you caught in that time. Don't know much about how this works at all, really. You're something new in the universe, Jack. Terrifying, and a little beautiful, and completely unique. I know you'll keep coming back. Everything else is just guessing."

Breathing, which had been so sweet, was becoming a phenomenal effort, his chest was so heavy. He processed the Doctor's words. "I'm gonna die again," he concluded. The Doctor didn't answer. "Terrific," he muttered.

The Doctor's fingers smoothed the small lines in Jack's forehead and at the corners of his eyes and mouth before going back to caress his cheek.

"Doc," Jack said, eventually.

The Doctor made a small, inquiring noise.

Jack drew a pained breath. "Stay with me? Please?" He drew another, like breathing in mud, and waited.

The Doctor's fingers stilled for a moment on Jack's cheek. "Not going anywhere, me."

Jack exhaled, tiredly. He thought maybe he made some kind of an acknowledging sound. Maybe not, but the Doctor was still there, hand still on a body that felt increasingly distant to Jack. He ought, he thought, to work harder at dying. The sooner it was done, the sooner he'd feel better. But he fought to stay with that touch; fought for each shallow, gasping breath; fought for the bare glow that faded away in front of his eyes; fought for each heartbeat, until finally, it just wouldn't come.

Jack exhaled in a soft, slight rattle and felt the Doctor's fingertips brush his lips.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by aibhinn.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own the Doctor, Rose, Jack, Doctor Who, or the BBC. The rest is mine, but you can't write science fiction without inventing a few things.

Rose made a beeline for the washroom off the bedroom she and Jack had been sharing of late. She'd barely taken the time to give Vahkeet some vague explanation about the TARDIS being a capsule before opening the door to the police box, and at that, she'd hardly beaten the Doctor's coming out of it with the borrowed space suit under his arm. Under normal circumstances, she tried to avoid leaving explanations or apologies in the Doctor's hands, but the rest of the universe could go hang at the moment: She had to see for herself that Jack was all right.

She stopped just past the washroom door, where she could see into the shower. _Very loosely "all right,"_ she thought. _Not like I should have expected anything else, but still--it also travels in time!_ "He _left_ you like this?" she exclaimed, toeing her trainers off and shucking her hoodie.

Jack sat on the floor in the shower big enough for three or four with his back against the wall, his knees pulled up to his chest, and his arms wrapped loosely about them. Trails of damp grey stuff trickled down his skin under the influence of the water. He opened his eyes. "It's okay, Rose. I made him go. I didn't want to make you worry any longer. I'm just . . . weary. Sitting down sounded good, and the water's still warm down here."

Rose had her top and her bra off. "I'll help you, be just a sec." She unbuttoned her jeans and skinned out of them and her knickers all at once. "God, I don't know if I've ever been so scared, Jack. Facing down a Dalek, maybe. Mostly, we don't have time to be scared--too busy running to keep up with the Doctor." She walked over to the shower and slid in beside him.

"Tell me about it," he said, ruefully.

He was too pale under the grey gook, and there were faint lines around his eyes. She knelt down beside him and kissed his lips. "Don't ever do that again," she breathed.

He looked at her under half-lidded eyes. "To save you and him?" Rose opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off with a kiss, barely moving his head to do it. She smoothed her fingers through his water-soaked hair, drawing out more grey, gritty stuff. "Sorry, sweetheart. No promises. I'd do it again in a heartbeat."

She sighed. "Our Jack," she breathed, and brushed the water out of her eyes. "Don't suppose you got as far as soap, yeah?" He chuckled, and she stood to grab shampoo off the shelf. "So you're not still hurt, are you? 'Cos you look like the morning after the night before." She knelt down again and he closed his eyes, letting her help with his hair.

"Weak, mostly," he muttered, and spat back some of the bubbles that trickled into his mouth. "I'll be fine. Food, sleep, and watching my favorite people come a couple of times will make everything right in the world." He leered a little, his eyes still closed.

Rose felt a tight knot in her throat as she combed through his hair with her fingers, letting the last of the suds trickle out. "I really, really hate losing you," she murmured.

"Me, too," the Doctor said, close at hand. She startled a little, and Jack slitted his eyes under the shower spray. The Doctor had made it out of his boots and jacket and was tugging his jumper off over his head. "I'll help him stand, Rose; you can do the soap."

She nodded. "There's this grey stuff all over his skin." She stood up and traded shampoo for soap while the Doctor finished undressing and helped an unprotesting Jack to his feet.

"It _is_ skin. Dead cells," the Doctor said.

Rose said, "Ugh!" She flicked her fingers like that would get it off, then swallowed hard and rubbed soap onto a flannel. She was sure that if they hadn't been covered with more disgusting things yet, they would be eventually.

The Doctor inspected Jack's skin as he braced their lover upright. "I wonder why skin and not hair . . . ?"

Rose glared at him. "Not a science project, Doctor," she declared, scrubbing gingerly at Jack's skin with a soapy flannel. The skin itself seemed like new under the grey gook, once the flannel exposed it.

Jack chuckled. "All this attention," he murmured, "and yet somehow, I have no desire to repeat the experiment."

The Doctor kissed the back of his head. "Can't say as I blame you, lad."

Rose looked at them, thoughtfully. There was a tension missing from them both, and that awful little line that had nested between the Doctor's eyebrows since they left Satellite 5 was gone. All it took was almost losing Jack again. Blokes. "'m pretty wrecked, myself, and all I did was sit in the control room," Rose said. "I wouldn't mind crawling into bed when we're done here. Think I'm goin' to shake for awhile."

"Shaking sounds good," Jack admitted. "Better in company. I'll join you."

The Doctor said, "Make it three."

Despite everything, Rose caught her breath and smiled.

***

  
The Doctor undressed in the dim glow of the TARDIS's night-cycle. He'd stayed with his partners until they slept, he and Rose bracketing Jack between them without consulting, and then he'd gone to move the TARDIS through the Vortex, given some thought to a safe place they might rest for awhile, and done some reading on trauma in humans to see if it would tell him anything he didn't already know. Because he thought Jack was going to be shaking for a while yet to come.

Now he'd returned to discover Jack awake in the middle of the bed, his body wound so tight he was shivering in spite of the temperature and the duvet. The Doctor slid beneath the bedclothes, slipped right through the strange frisson that was Jack's existence, and pressed his skin against the human's. Jack made a small, pained noise, and then began to relax. "I thought maybe you weren't coming back," he whispered.

The Doctor had been so long absent from this bed. Hadn't been able to sleep through the strangeness that was Jack, hadn't felt right making love to Rose while Jack was left out . . . been making all three of them right unhappy, he had, in spite of himself. He ought to tell Jack he'd always come back, but it was a promise he wasn't sure he could keep. He could only account for now. "Doesn't seem to bother me anymore," he said.

Jack was still tense, but he sighed a little with relief. "Good," he murmured. The Doctor propped himself up in the bed and caressed the other man's face, leaning close to kiss him. He touched shoulders and arms and chest, meaning to help ease tight muscles, but he found himself marveling at the sensation of passing through Jack's radiating aura of stillness instead. He stroked and caressed his way down the body he remembered, finding Jack's cock half-hard by the time he touched it, and continued feeling every centimeter of new skin, all the way down to his feet.

Jack looked bemused when the Doctor tugged at his hip, but he rolled over. "Making sure everything's still there, Doc?" he murmured, dryly.

The Doctor stroked his way through Jack's hair and then dug his thumbs into the taut muscles of the human's neck. Jack murmured wordlessly, shuddering once and then letting his head loll under the touch. "Making sure it's still mine," the Doctor said softly. He swallowed, immediately wishing he could recall the words.

Jack relaxed infinitesimally, though, and sighed. "But you're not possessive, no. Wouldn't be Time Lord-like." He managed to chuckle.

"Shut it," the Doctor grumbled, working his way slowly down Jack's back.

He'd made it as far as the other man's thighs, collecting small groans and other soft noises along the way, when Jack said, "Much as I'm enjoying this, it's going to be _awfully_ hard to get back to sleep after this kind of attention."

The Doctor paused with his hand in the hollow of Jack's knee. "Not planning to leave you this way, Jack," he soothed, finding his way down Jack's calves and along the soles of his feet. _"Not going anywhere,"_ hung in the air, quite, quite audible without any touch to a telepathic contact point.

He couldn't always keep his companions safe. It was no different with these two who were lovers and partners, even now that one of them would never--never--stay dead. But just for now, one day--one night--at a time, he could be here. He could soothe the shaking in the middle of the night, and not the whole sodding Time Vortex could hold him apart from them.

The Doctor stretched out on the bed and caught Jack around the waist, pulling him up on his side and holding him so the entire length of their bodies was pressed together, spoon-fashion. The Doctor let his head fall forward, forehead pressed against Jack's hair, and curved his arm over the hollow of Jack's hip, stroking the other man's erection.

Jack shivered under the Doctor's ministrations and didn't move, only biting his lip against the sounds it drew from him. Without a great deal of success, as it happened, but it wasn't the first time they'd woken Rose in the middle of the night and it wouldn't be the last. She mostly had a habit of opening one eye before rolling over, or sometimes joining in, depending on where she was in her sleep pattern. Now, though, she watched, a gentle smile on her face. It had hurt her, the Doctor knew, to watch him and Jack hurting each other. It healed something in all of them, to be able to touch again.

Jack came with a strangled cry, hips pressing into the Doctor's hand and back in a taut arch before he went limp in his lover's arms. A few moments later, Rose scooted over to snuggle against him, damp spots and all. Jack startled--the ability of human sexual response to completely block one's awareness of one's surroundings never failed to amuse the Doctor--and drew her close. "Welcome home," she said.

Jack sighed, contently. The Doctor stroked his partners' hips with his hand and arm.

"Doctor," Rose asked after awhile, "you talked to Vahkeet when you returned that space suit, yeah? Did she say what will happen to Culabree, now?"

"They'll rebuild," the Doctor said. "Pr'tansi and People of Song, together."

"Second station, actually," Jack put in, sleepily. "They don't try to salvage the first."

Rose said, "Oxygen and chlorine in the same station, again? Even after what happened?"

Jack reached up to stroke her hair. The Doctor said, "Of course. Grand interspecies collaboration." He held them close to him. "Some things are worth doing. Even though they're hard."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Key](https://archiveofourown.org/works/149938) by [firefly124](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firefly124/pseuds/firefly124)




End file.
